Beyond the First Sale: The Post-Launch Blueprint Every Non-Fiction Author Needs

Hello. Hello. Welcome to the AuthorTube Writing Conference. Jack, I see you've already said hello. Dreaming Truth Author. Welcome. Let me just go ahead and share my screen so we can dive in. While I'm doing that, you guys can go ahead and say hello. And if you were at the Future of Book Marketing Summit that we had last week, you will know a little bit of what I'm going to share, but not all of it. So I'm excited to dive in. Okay, one sec while we find the slides, because they keep moving on me, me and technology. All right. S.D. houston. Hello. Welcome. So good to see you here. Okay, so where did it go? All right, so today we're talking about what happens after launch, and we're going to dive into some ideas for how to market your book after the launch. But for some reason, it's not sharing. Oh, there we go. I didn't have the file open. That's why. Okay. I had closed it in anticipation. Okay. All right. Why your book? This is where I need. Angela, Antoine's here. Hello, Antoine. So, so good to see you. My counterpart, Angela, who does all my live streams, it's. It's End of Day Friday for her, so she is not here and. Okay, not now. Let me try one more time. Otherwise, we'll just go with it. I will just talk you guys through it, but I wanted to give you guys slides. Okay, I've got it. It's working now. My apologies. Okay, so as I was saying, we're talking about beyond the launch. So even if your book is already out, that's okay, because we are going to talk about things that are happening for you after the launch. But these things will work before launch, and even thinking about these things while you're working on a book can help. The only caveat I'll put on all of this is that I'm a nonfiction specialist, so everything I'm talking about has nonfiction origins. Although plenty of fiction friends hang out and do say they're able to apply it to what they're doing. Okay, so welcome to the 2025 AuthorTube Writing Conference sponsored by WTC Creatives and later Press, both really cool companies. So we're diving in. So, my story, really quick. I know Jack knows it and Antwan knows it, and a few other people know it, but it started with Rich Dad. My story started, you know, once upon a time, but my story, as far as book publishing, started actually with Rich dad, poor dad, in 2001. Not because I set out and wrote a book after I read this, but Because I started investing in real estate and started to build a real estate portfolio. That's actually my first property that I ever purchased in 2001. I don't still own it. That driveway, the picture doesn't show it, but that driveway was a bear. I thought I got a great deal, but it was a great deal because nobody wanted to drive up that driveway and especially in the winter because that's in Canada. I'm in Las Vegas now. But this book got me started investing in real estate. And I started a newsletter in 2006 to share some of my crazy experiences because I, after buying that property, I bought another one right away. And then I was out of money. So I started to take courses on, you know, doing no money down deals and buying properties with other people's money. And the stories get quite exciting. So I started a newsletter. And then in 2008, not because I have good timing, I quit my full time job and went full time as a real estate investor and started a training and education company. And in 2009, I started a YouTube channel. So my first YouTube channel that. There it is, my friends still alive. Somebody else has purchased it along with my company and the courses that I had built. So everything I built is still alive somewhere in Canada. All right, but that whole building of a platform. Wait a minute, I won't show you that slide yet. That whole building of a platform of YouTube and the newsletter, it attracted Wiley in Canada to ask me if I would write a book with them. And I said yes. I've always wanted to write a book. That little girl inside of me that wanted to be a writer until somebody squashed that dream and told me, writers don't make money. And then I high school teacher gave me a C and I thought, I'm a crappy writer too, so I'm not going to make money and I'm going to be bad at it. So I went to business school. So when Wiley approached me and said, we're interested in working with you on a book, I was like, oh my gosh. So I gave them my book idea and they went, oh no, not that one, no, no, we don't like that one. And then they said, but we've got this idea, go write a proposal for this idea. So I did. I went off and I wrote the proposal. And after three months, I hired somebody to help me with it. I did all the things. And then they said, oh no, no, no, you don't have a strong enough platform to sell enough books. It's like, why did you approach me in the first place. And I can laugh and smile about it now because it was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. But at the time, I was devastated. But I ended up going back to that idea that they went, oh, no, not that idea. Because I had read like 65 different books in the real estate space, and I knew that my idea was something that hadn't been done before. There was a market for it. And even if I could just help one reader, I thought, I'll do it. And that was this book. And I ended up taking it to number one on Amazon, ahead of Dan Brown, ahead of Game of Thrones. I was in the top 100 print books for almost 200 days. And still, that was 2013. And still to this day, the book has decent sales momentum, selling, you know, somewhere between 25 to 50 copies a month still, especially in Canada. So that book met a lot of things that we're going to talk about today. But I also. Oh, and also it led to building of those businesses that I had. So I had an investment company and I had a training and education company, and it led to stages, it led to media clients. My. My education company doubled in revenue in the 12 months following that book. And it's because of a lot of fundamental principles that were in place, almost, you know, some on purpose, some I didn't realize at the time. So it was a little bit of. A little bit of luck and good fortune that kind of applied to it. But what I became passionate about was helping other people write books that are set up to sell and grow their brand and grow their business because I saw the power it had for me. But I also saw a lot of authors that tried to do what I did that fell flat. And they fell flat because they weren't thinking about how they were going to sell their book until the book was already on Amazon. And so there's a lot of strategy that goes into this that if your book is already out, it's not too late, but there may be things that you want to do a second edition in order to set it up for a better chance of success. And ultimately all of that led me to leaving real Estate in 2017 and launching book Launchers, which is a full service self publishing company that helps you write publishers and promote a nonfiction book to grow your brand and your business. And we always joke that we're. We're flying a plane and we're fixing the plane and building, making the plane go faster and do cool tricks all while we're in the plane. So my, my designer who does our covers, she made the book launchers plane with my team, all in the plane. All right, so a few things before I get into what to do post launch. This came from the summit that we just had. And I think it's valuable information to kind of think about what's changing in book marketing. Because. Because while some things are staying exactly the same, there are some things that have fundamentally changed. And I think it's important. When you're looking at your book again, we're talking about what to do after it's come out. I think it's really important to have the fundamentals in place, but also to be thinking about how marketing is changing and what's working or what worked last year now isn't necessarily working today. But the one thing, and this is where we'll end up spending a bit of time today, is that connection to other people's audiences. That is what drove my book to number one in 2013, and that is what sells books today. If you can get your book in front of another person's audience, that is a connected audience for you, that is going to drive success for your book. And going back to my story about more than cash flow, the single reason that it went to number one and had such a strong launch and beyond was because of other people's audiences. At the time, I had, I mean, you might have even seen the screenshot that I took from my YouTube channel. Even today, I think, I think it had, I don't know, 5,000, 8,000. It never was a big channel. My newsletter list had about 10,000 people on it. Now, back then, open rates were like 60 to 70%. So it was a good amount of people were actually reading newsletters back then. But still, that's not a massive, massive platform. But what I did have was relationships with people that were. That had my reader, somebody who is a new real estate investor or interested in getting into real estate in their audiences, like realtors and mortgage brokers, they were really keen on my message in my book. And one particular group they ran, they still have the company actually called Rockstar Real Estate. They promoted the heck out of this and they had a big audience and a really engaged audience. But other people who ran smaller real estate investment groups that I had been a part of or I had attended or I had supported in different ways, they all promoted this too. And that is why the book went so, so high so fast. The second thing is author platform. And that is still important today. Be building an email list. It's fundamental. And after launch, make sure you're still emailing your and even more so today, I put it in bold. Being human, right? So doing things that show people you're human on that platform are so important because so many things are AI now. Now in 2013, Amazon distribution I did get bookstore distribution, so I was very wide with my print book. But Amazon distribution was amazing. You could put your book on Amazon, do a little bit and Amazon would sell your book. Not for you completely, but it did a lot. Today, relying on Amazon is risky business. A lot of people run into issues with relying on solely Amazon. It's also, you know, to me, you're missing out on people who won't buy from Amazon, who don't shop there. You're missing out on libraries. If you're, if you're solely distributed on Amazon, some libraries will still buy your book from Amazon. But you know, it's better to have a wide distribution for a lot of books and a lot of goals. And I love Direct to Reader because Amazon will never tell you who bought your book. So when you're promoting your list to buy your book on Amazon, you're never going to find out who purchased and you're making way less money versus if you promote to your list to just buy it from you, you now know who your loyal customers are. You can promote to them a little bit more if you have a course or a companion workbook or maybe it's the first of a series. So now you know who to promote. Book two to Direct to Reader is a powerful tool in an author's tool belt today that really wasn't there in 2013. Now here's where things get fun. 2013 SEO, Google, those were all big players and it was important that you had your SEO in line today. Being recommended by LLM or better known as ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, that is changing the way things go. And I've got an example for you in a minute. But what we're seeing, and so many other people are seeing who were really good at SEO, they're seeing their traffic go down really rapidly. And in our case at Book Launchers, we're actually seeing it get replaced by ChatGPT traffic in particular. So that is great for us because we're clearly getting found by ChatGPT. But if you're losing traffic from SEO and you're not getting it replaced by ChatGPT, there's some things you want to pay attention to. 2013 Pay per click Ads were cheap. You could run pay per Click ads for your book and actually make a profit. I don't find that's the case for nonfiction very often, unless you have a back end that you're upselling to, but your ads are not going to be net profitable for the the typical nonfiction book. But connecting with influencers, now, that's big, right? TikTok influencers, other influencers, those are really, really big. Ebook and print format were kind of the thing people talked about in 2013. Back end strategies are today. There was a formulaic approach in 2013 that worked. That's how I got my book to number one. It's kind of following the formula and executing it. It worked. Those formulas, they don't work so well today. Sure, there's tried and true activities and actions that you can take, but it is more like looking at data and making decisions and, and figuring out what's working for you, what's working for your audience, what's getting you closer to your goals. I also think 2013, really, back then, bestseller lists were the be all end. All right, being number one on Amazon was a, you know, a fairly big deal. Although Oprah didn't call, I didn't dance with Ellen. But being a bestseller back then carried a lot more weight than it does today. Because today people realize it's a game. They realize they're largely curated. And even on Amazon, I mean, Amazon's realized people have been playing this game and they're trying to change it, which is why there's been all this Amazon algorithm and sales rank brouhaha lately. So sales longevity, consistent sales conversions, those are the way of the future. And I can even add conversion to this. But connection, community and content, that is really the secret to marketing a book after it's out today, 2025 and beyond. I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but I do want to talk about a couple points here because I have heard them come up over and over again with a lot of authors. And that one is, you know, I don't believe you're attending this conference, the AuthorTube Writing Conference. So I don't think you're probably going to fall for the idea of if I write a great book, readers will come. I think that's less of a myth for authors that are active in communities like this. But the marketing feels icky, keeps coming up over and over again. And so I wanted to just spend a quick moment on this because one of the big strategies, when I lay out, you know, the five things, six things to do after your book is Already out, one of them is reaching out to other people. And. Well, actually quite a few of them involve that because you want to ask for more reviews, but getting yourself in front of other people's audiences. And people often resist that because marketing feels icky. Well, I don't see it as that. I see it as you wrote the book to have an impact, and if you don't reach your reader, then you're not going to have that impact. And so you're really only serving that audience that you created this book for if you share details about your book. So to me, it's all about service and it's. I'm not even marketing my book. Again, really, like, what are you making when you sell a book? Four or five dollars. Right. So it's not like you stand to benefit massive amounts of money by sharing this book. Right. You've put your knowledge, experience stories into a book because you want to have an impact and ultimately have an income as well, which you probably have other plans of how you're going to generate money beyond just your book sales. But ultimately that first goal isn't selling a book, it's serving that reader. And when you position it that way, I find most people start to get more comfortable and even excited about talking about their book because they need to reach the reader so they can have the impact, which is why they wrote the book in the first place. And the other thing I'll touch on here is Amazon. Some people do think Amazon is a marketing strategy. I get a lot of people who come to book launchers and will say, okay, what have you done to market your book? I put it on Amazon. Okay, and then what? And then they go. And then it didn't sell. Okay. Or I sold a couple copies that I think my mom bought one of them. So Amazon is not a marketing strategy. They're also not a publishing company. They are a service to distribute your book to readers. And you have to tell readers that your book is there. And you have to teach Amazon who to show your book to so they can show it to the right people. So Amazon does not equal marketing strategy. So the mindset to take into the book post launch is writing the book was the beginning. Right. It felt like the hard thing was done, but it's not. That was just the beginning of your journey. And you know, also in this day and age of AI humanity is actually a marketing strategy. The more you bring your human self into what you're doing, the more likely you are to succeed. But ultimately success is to me, especially in the nonfiction realm, but I would say anywhere. Your book is a business, and I know you probably didn't write it thinking you were starting a business, but it is. And so your whole ecosystem that you're building is bigger than your book. You're not just promoting a book, you are building a brand and a business around this book. So. So you can enjoy the impact and the income that you set out to create for yourself and for the audience that is around you. Now, this is the example that I said I wanted to share with you. This is our client, Ben Wiener. His book Fever Pitch. And when he, when I think it was his son actually searched and was Just curious on ChatGPT, what is the number one selling book right now in the startup market? Because this book is for startups. And as it says here, in May 2025, the top selling book in the startup category is the E Myth Revised. But then it goes down here and it says if you are looking for a more recent release in the startup space, Fever Pitch is there. So then you can start to check the sources and you'll see that Goodreads and Amazon were the sources and he was in the top releases in the startup category. And I think that's what drove this. So when you think about that, I mean, for me, whenever I'm asking questions of ChatGPT or any of the other places, perplexity, I always click the sources so I can see where it's pulling from. But I think it's really important to think about this because so many people are running around afraid that their data is being used to train the LLMs and then they're going, oh, my book, my book, my content, or I'm not showing up as a recommended thing. Well, that's because you're not putting all these things out there. That doesn't mean load your book into ChatGPT and it's going to know about you. It means you have to create content and reference your book so that when it's searching that public world, it's finding it and it's going to create because it's different. Right? If you go, I've got this here, I'm not going to go through it in great detail, but the main output of a Google search is the list of links that somebody has to dig into to find the result. The outcome of searching on ChatGPT is a synthesized answer that's drawn from multiple sources. So that's a really big distinction. And so if you want to be showing up when somebody's got a top 10 you know, best startup books list. Well, go ahead and create that list and put it on your Goodreads site because they're using Goodreads. You know, you can find, you can even ask your favorite LLM what sources they are commonly using to make recommendations for books and then start creating content that will help train those models. But also think about how people search, right? They're, they're asking specific type questions and prompts of the LLM. So start creating content that is clearly the answer to that very thing that they're asking so that your content gets synthesized your book and you get recommended as the expert on that topic. Okay, what should you do to succeed? Your book is out now. What? Right, well, again, make your content. Oh, sorry, there's a pop up here. Make your content LLM friendly. So publicly accessible. Again, that doesn't mean loading your book onto ChatGPT. What it means is creating content on your website and on some of the high authority sites, even Wikipedia is a high authority site that it will look at, but it goes through places like Reddit and it's using Goodreads more and more and make information around your content or make content around your book so that it is being recommended or your website and things like that. And again, this is where the rich and well structured content really comes in. So sample chapters, do interviews and include the transcripts, include reviews that explain why your book is the book to be read. So if you've paid for an editorial review and it's really good, put it on your website so that it can be used in the synthesis answer that comes out. So get your book talked about multi format, multi format, multi site recommendations. Because again, it's synthesizing a whole bunch of information all at once. So if it keeps saying fever pitch, fever pitch, fever pitch using Ben Wiener's example, that is definitely going to come up in the recommendations and ultimately optimize for those prompts. Again, start to get familiar and comfortable with how people are prompting and create content that answers those questions. Now, all of that said, one thing is really important as I kind of get into a few tactics and a few more specifics is that really focus on what matters to you. So I think we're in this age of people look at and we're dealing with this, with this. A couple of our clients that are going, I want to do what X Author is doing right now. And we go, that's great. But X Author has been giving keynotes for 10 years and that's why she's on this stage and, and and so people are looking at what somebody's doing today and forgetting about the long path that they took to get there. And so I don't think it's reasonable to look at what another author is doing and saying, I want to do what that author's doing because their background, their experience, their content, their audience, they're all different. So focus on what's important to you, what does success look like for you? And then craft your journey and your marketing to set you up to have the best chance of reaching that. So, you know, and sure, if you want to do what X person is doing on stage, that's great. That's probably not going to happen. The minute your book comes out though, it's probably going to take you several years of doing smaller speaking engagements, building a killer speaker reel, getting recommended, getting recommendation letters, and then we can start to look at how you can get there. And your book can be used as a tool to get those smaller engagements and to start getting the credibility in the media and all those pieces so that a few years from now, maybe those stages are your stages too. So looking at what you want to do and why, and I put some ideas here, these are all common things that authors that come to us. You know, having your book adapted for a course in college, you know, using it to transition. We get a lot of people who are kind of, I say retiring because they're not necessarily of a retirement age, but they're leaving the career they've been in for 20, 25 years. And this is kind of that second phase, that second act or third act. And it's their book tied to consulting or speaking or workshops and things like that. So it's using as a pivot. So know your goal, know your version of success, not somebody else's. Know yours. Okay, so your book is out, you've already got sales, so now what? Well, that's why I started with the goals is because it does depend on your goals. What you're doing now really is going to be goal focused and goal dependent. So post first sale, if you haven't already the number one priority for every single author. It doesn't matter what your goal is, unless your goal is legacy, in which case, congratulations, you're done. But everybody else get reviews. And there's lots of ways to get reviews, you know, asking, begging, those are kind of the most common. I love get Authentic Book Reviews. It's a website that you can sign up for. I think she charges $3 a month, so really nominal right now. But it's worked it's really helped me get tons of reviews for self publish and succeed and self promote and succeed. And many of our authors are using it too. So it's been a great service. You do have to read other people's books in order to get tokens that will then allow you to get your book reviewed. So it does require some work, but it's great and it meets all the criteria of a verified not. Yeah, of a verified review on Amazon. And it's not against their terms or terms of service. Goodreads giveaways and Goodreads is getting more and more important in the whole Amazon sphere. And also, like I said, Goodreads content gets scraped, or scraped is the wrong word, is used to produce the synthesized answers for, you know, chat, GPT and others. And so being active on Goodreads is a good move if your audience is there, but also, you know, to feed some of these other kind of goals, if that's part of it. Book sprout, Book sirens. There's lots of places to get reviews, but, you know, getting reviews is really, really important because it's social proof. If you're pitching to media, media is going to look. And if they see seven reviews, they're probably not that excited about putting you on their TV show or their, their big live stream. But if they see 82 reviews, well, they might be like, okay, cool, this is legit. So the more reviews, the better. Your Amazon ads will tend to perform better. You know, I would argue Amazon's algorithm is going to favor you if you have more reviews and so forth. So reviews, I know they're hard, but it's so important. Number two is to grow your email list and then email it. I didn't put that on there, email it, but I know a lot of people who are like, I've got 500 people on my list, but I haven't emailed them in four months. I'm like, they've forgotten who you are. Email them at least twice a month now. And what do you email them? Well, that depends on your book, your content, your personality. But it can just be a tip or if you are creating content or if you are doing things like interviews, podcast interviews. It can be a, hey, I was on this podcast. You know, depends on your content. You can take excerpts from your book and share those things. So it really does depend. We do have, and I put a little link down there, we have built new software that I'm super excited about and I'm not going to do a big promo for it, even though I could talk about it all day long. But it's called Author Launch Kit. And you can go to book launchers.comalk and author launch Kit will craft emails for you. It will help you with your pitches, it will help you think of who else to pitch to. We're going talk about that in a second. You can see that on number four here. And it helps you with the content creation, the social media, all of that stuff it actually crafts. It creates lists of people to contact and actually crafts the content for you to use in this outreach as well as on your website and all of these things. So writes articles for you. So much stuff. It's awesome. But all of those things are really, really important for that what to do after your book is already out. Number three is running Amazon ads. And it's actually. I know, I think Dale Roberts has a session coming up right after this one and his session is a roundtable talking about Amazon ads. And one of the things that he and I were just talking about was how he actually runs Amazon ads in advance of the launch. Typically we're actually running them about two weeks after, once somebody has reviews because they tend to perform better. But definitely go to his session on Amazon Ads because he's going to talk about with all of the experts at the table some of the reasons why they're running Amazon ads in advance and how to make them perform. And you know, obviously have lower ROI expectations pre launch, but post launch, I think Amazon ads are essential. And while they're not always profitable for every single book, I think that it helps with the Amazon algorithm a lot. It also helps you kind of defend your space so that when somebody is searching for your book or your topic or something like that, your book will show up. And fun fact for you, I just yesterday was talking to somebody who had invited me to speak on her summit and she curated 21 females for this summit. She went through 300 different authors on Amazon. She used Amazon as her expert database and, and she was searching particular search terms to find people that were talking about like three different things. I'm not going to reveal her her stuff, but she had a very specific methodology and she was using Amazon to find it. So if you're not showing up when somebody searches with certain words, not only could you be missing book sales, but you might be missing cool speaking opportunities like this opportunity that I was invited to yesterday just because she found my book and me on Amazon. So using Amazon ads to increase your visibility can, can lead to opportunities that aren't just book Sales. But again, it also gives you data. And if you go back to what I was talking about with 2013 versus 2025 and beyond, to me, we're in an era where we as indie authors can get data. And that data allows us to make better decisions and refine our actions towards our goals. Goals. If you're not running Amazon ads, it's hard to, it's, it's harder. You can still get data from other aspects, especially if you're doing direct sales, but you're not getting as much data as you could be getting. So you might be assuming your book cover is performing. But if you have ad data, you can see for sure. Well, maybe not for sure, but you can have a pretty good idea that it might be time to refresh your cover. Or you can see, okay, my cover did the job. They clicked on my ad, but now they're not converting. Is it my book description? Do I have enough reviews? So that data gives you things to work with, improve and refine, but if you're not doing that, you won't have that data. All right, number four we're going to go into. I've got multiple areas that I'm going to share because this is my favorite strategy and we still have time. If you have questions, I will have time for questions as well. So you can post those and I'll go back and find them. But we're going to talk about pitching yourself to opa, which is other people's audiences, and then creating content for your favorite platforms. As I mentioned, this is more important. It's all, I think it's been important forever, but I think it's more important than ever because you want to be found by the LLMs, the chatgpts and the clods and the complexities of the world and creating content for those other platforms out there that is going to help you a lot in being found and being seen as the expert and the authority in, in that subject matter. I also recommend ebook sales every 90 to 120 days. You know, run them wherever you're selling books. But it's great to research your book. And again, this is more about, I would run a three or five day sale if you're doing, if you're doing an ebook sale, but it just helps with reigniting a book, keeping it front and center, helping it with the algorithms, finding new readers, getting, you know, just keeping it fresh. You don't have to do it, but it is useful. We see the benefits of it with our authors just running on a regular cycle. So why most book marketing fails is often a lack of strategy, inconsistent action, or you're missing out on the platform. So this is why I've laid this foundation of your book might be out, but there's still things to do, right? The hard work of getting the book done was only phase one. Right. Phase two has its own approach. Now to me, strategy, you can have a strategy, but I think more is to think about your goal and what actions you're taking to move yourself closer to that goal and then taking action on a consistent basis. And I've got a really cool story that I'm going to share next on how having. Taking action, having a strategy, and having a good, solid platform can set you up for lightning to strike. So Jonathan Stanley is one of our clients, and he wrote Purposeful Performance and lightning struck for him. His book had been out for about eight months, and he was still marketing his book. He was still doing that consistent action. He was booking Barnes and Noble book signings for himself. And this one store had originally said no to him, but then he called, he kind of kept in touch, and they said, yeah, yeah, okay, we're featuring local authors now, so you can come in. So he booked the Barnes and Noble book signing, and he actually said he almost didn't go, but his wife was like, no, no, you're going. You committed to this. Go do it. And he went and he, you know, he had a normal book signing day where people come up and they go, hey, there's the cookbook section here. Or they walk by and you're like, hopeful. And then they don't talk to you. Or they say, is there a Starbucks in here? You know, where's the bathroom? Those are all the things people always ask me when I'm doing a book signing. And so that day was normal, right? You're sitting there for a couple hours and not talking to a lot of people. He sold 12 books, but he went home and said it was a success because he had met this little girl, you can see in this picture, this little girl. And they had talked. Her mom bought a book and he signed it. And she told him she wanted to be an author when she grows up. And so that was a highlight. So he went home, he told his wife, it was a great day. I sold 12 books and I met this little girl. Well, little did he know, the mom and the girl had filmed a video posted actually, about him sitting at the table where nobody was talking to him, which is why they went up and bought his book and talked to him, because they Felt sad that he was sitting there alone. And they filmed it, posted on TikTok and it went crazy, crazy viral. Why? I have no idea. The video's nice, but it's, you know, not of this world. But the story just hit and 100 million views later, Jonathan's life is totally different. And it's only been out a few months, but his. He started selling massive amounts of books. The reviews started pouring in and he was on Good Morning America. You know, People magazine interviewed him. USA Today. Like, the list is so long. But what I think is really important about this story is a. It was consistent action. Eight months later, he's still out there doing bookstore signings and promoting his book two. And actually, I think I have a slide for this. He had a book that was ready for the spotlight, right? And I can say this, but it was very, very well packaged because my team did it. But it had a great title, it's well edited, it's a great story. It's a really, really great book because when people bought it and started reading it, boy, you can imagine the reviews would have killed it if it wasn't a great book. But his reviews have all been so sparkling because it is a fantastic book and he had a clear brand. So when the People magazine, you know, producers and all of the other people that started to find him went to his LinkedIn, went to his website, they saw a clear brand. So that made them all the more comfortable to be like, hey, come on our show. We want to talk about what just happened in your book. He also had a ready to go media kit with talking points, which makes it really easy when a major producer calls you and says, hey, we're interested in interviewing you. You know, can you send us your materials? It's ready to rock. And all the retail systems were ready. You know, his book had already been out for eight months, but, you know, to suddenly handle thousands and thousands of book sales, which is what happened, he had to have everything ready. And it was. But I think ultimately, you know, again, remember he went home after that book signing and told his wife it was a success. He sold 12 books. And he impacted somebody's life positively that day. And that mindset of gratitude has carried him through all these crazy opportunities and all the things that are going on and you can check them out on LinkedIn or he's on TikTok now, too. He wasn't on TikTok at the time and just follow along. But all of this is really to remind you that that consistent action is so important and Ultimately, other people's audiences, right? Because this happened not because of his audience, but because he was at Barnes and Noble in front of the Barnes and Noble bookstore audience. So other people's audiences, there's lots, right? There's, you know, the bookstores, there's podcasters, there's, you know, there's influencers, there's other people's newsletters, there's other authors. There's so many options for you. But ultimately, you know, my favorite is speaking. So getting yourself in front of an audience that's in front of the room. And I'm an introvert, so anybody who's sitting there going, I'm an introvert. I won't speak, I'll tell you is the best thing. Because now people come up to me and talk to me so I don't have to make small chat and try to awkwardly find people to talk to. They'll come and talk to me. But also, I can impact a large amount of people in a very short period of time. So I can conserve my energy instead of having to network with a thousand people one at a time. I'm able to stand in front. Well, I haven't spoken to 1,800 was my largest audience ever. But you know what I'm saying. Now, a couple quick tips. I'm not going to go too deep into this, but books as currency. So maybe you're not at the level where you're getting paid to speak, and I often speak for free anyways, because just being in front of the right audience can make great things happen. So I'm not always looking for a paid engagement. It's different because I run a company where there's lots of ways that we can monetize an appearance in other ways. But having your book as currency can go a long ways. So if there's 100 people in the audience and you can sell your book to them at a profit of $10 per book, right? Let's say it costs you $5 to print it. You can sell it to them for $15 a book. Now, now, you've just gotten paid to speak. Maybe not big, big money, but you've also got your book in the hands of a lot of people who can now read it, refer it, and recommend you, which is really, really important. So that can be powerful. You can also have two contracts. One is your speaking fee, you know, maybe it's 2,000, $5,000, you know, 10,000. And the other one is your speaking fee plus books. And now you've just added, you know, $1,000 or whatever it is in net profit to you with that second contract. And a lot of organizations will choose that one where it's speaking plus book. You can also have a table at the back of the room and ultimately always try to get an email address. So if you're not getting paid, it's probably going to be totally fine that you do something that drives people to an email list, give them, give some sort of a freebie away, offer to give them your slides, connect with you in some other way. You know, even have a feedback form that you pass out that you collect feedback and potentially an opt in to your newsletter list. But if you're speaking and you're not getting paid, you know, make sure that you're at least building your platform. One of my favorites is partnerships. So the book's out and you're looking around and you're going, okay, now what do I do? Well, find anybody you talked about favorably in that book. If you've got a favorite product or service or company that you love and you're recommending or endorsing or using them, maybe there's some sort of partnership there that whether it's they give their book to certain readers. One of my favorite partnerships with that first book was with Canadian Real Estate wealth magazine. They, I gave them, I think 250 copies of my book and in exchange I was the keynote speaker on, I don't know, so many of their events. They gave me tables at every event where they normally charge sponsors for it. I got magazine advertisements in the magazine quarter every. I got four. So I had four. One every three months, I think, half page ads. That was massive, massive amounts of benefit to me in my business because I didn't promote my book. I used it to promote my education and training company. But that partnership was so great and I love the magazine and I wrote articles for them and so on. So is there some sort of a partnership you can form and other authors can also be this partnership for you? If you have similar audiences where you guys can promote each other, that can be a partnership. Influencers, you know, you could give them books for books in exchange for, you know, giveaways to get a mention. Sometimes they'll interview you on their platform, all of those kind of things. You can also potentially seek sponsors, I think. I don't know. Just speaking of Dale, he had sponsors. He had four of his books in this series. I don't know if this one was sponsored or not, but he got sponsors for his books. So if you're doing an event or you're doing some sort of a book signing and there's a certain type of person in the audience that, you know a company will want to get in front of. You might be able to get some sort of a sponsor relationship where they might promote your event, but they might even give you money for it. Who knows? You know, get creative because there's lots of opportunities. Again, just think about who your reader is and anything that will help them, especially around what you've created. Created. So if you're talking about dog training, then you might have certain dog products that help with that dog training. Well, now maybe those companies, they have events that maybe you can do something with them at those events or maybe there's a certain. Just trying to think out of the box. Some of the pet stores, they might want to feature your book or do an event with you. Those kind of things go a long way. And a lot of authors don't try to create those kind of win win situations. And if you do, you'll find that you're selling one to, you know, one book or sorry, you'll find you're selling many books to one place, which I love because one to one selling takes a long time to sell a lot of books if you're selling one book to one reader. But if you can sell one book to one organization and sell a hundred at a time, now you're going to start moving, moving copies. A couple quick things on this. Where are you a patron that might be an opportunity for a partnership. This is my second book that I released. 2017. 16. 20. Yeah, 2016. And I did an event at my local CrossFit gym because I was, I was a very regular patron of that CrossFit gym at the time. They, and then there was some charities that people, local charities, people wanted to support. So we did an event for these charities. The charities promoted it, the CrossFit gym promoted it. And it was just a lot of fun. But there's things going on in your neighborhood. There's places. My dentist office also promoted my book. But there's, there's people who would love to promote what you're doing. There's also farmers markets, other places that are doing fundraisers, all of those kind of events. There could be an opportunity, but you have to start asking first. Libraries are also a great thing to leverage after your book is out. One of our clients, Linda Magoon, she's like our library superstar because we booked her at one library event. And that talk, it wasn't a reading, it was more of a talk Kind of the origin of the book and, and a little bit about the book. That talk went so well. Other libraries started calling her. So they heard about the event and started calling her. So readings are common, but a lot of librarians have told us they're not interested in readings. They more like the stuff that, that readers can't get from the book. They want the behind the scenes, the making of or a training to come out of it. Like if you're a tax professional and you wrote a book on tax tips, come in and do a tax training. They're not necessarily going to pay you, but they will stock your book, they'll let you sell books, they'll promote it to the community. So there's lots of opportunities to partner with your local libraries or local bookstores as well. All right, I'm going to take questions in a second. I want to tie it all together because I gave you guys a lot and I could have gone into more, but I didn't. I wanted to pick my favorite things and share those with you to help you get more books, more moving after your book is already out. But your goals drive what you focus on. So again, there's so many things that you can do. It can be overwhelming. It can be a lot. Focus on the one or two things you can try that are likely to move you closer to your big picture goal, right? So if your big picture goal is to be on a stage, the things that you should do right now should focus on getting you on stages with your book so that you can move towards those big stages. If your goal is to generate leads for your business, then how can you put yourself in front of other people's audiences so that you're getting email addresses and leveraging your book to do that? Other people's audiences are the fastest way to do this. You can build social media platforms all day long for most people. That's slow, right? You know, if you're, if you're getting 100 new people on your social media platform a month, that can feel really good. But even then, how many of them are going to click on an opportunity to buy something from you? It's small percentages, right? Single digits percentage. So you're not going to have the kind of impact you can have if you get in front of an engaged podcast audience or in front of an engaged audience in your local community. You can move a lot of books and open a lot of doors for future opportunities using other people's audiences. And ultimately, whatever you're doing, always be platform building. And for me platform, sure, it's YouTube. I love YouTube. Love, love all you folks who are always watching every video. But for me, email address is where is that list that you control? Because one day YouTube might wake up and go, we don't like the book Broad. And they shut me off. I hope they never do that. But it happens, right? That's why I say don't rely on Amazon only. Because we've heard more and more authors just get shut down completely sometimes with no explanation. And it's really hard to get turned back on to Amazon after you've been shut down. So, you know, not relying on them, but also not relying on Facebook or Instagram or any of these platforms that may or may not be there, or they may or may not show your content to your audience, build your own platform, build that thing you control and keep going. Jonathan Stanley's lightning, lightning bolt moment wouldn't have happened. I mean it wouldn't have, it wouldn't have carried on if his book wasn't great and his platform wasn't ready. But it never would have happened if he wasn't still marketing his book again. Eight months later, he was still out there doing book signings and celebrating a 12 book sale in a day. So keep going and keep, I mean, as long as you want things to be happening from your book. That's as long as you need to keep talking about it and sharing it. And remember, you're not selling, you're serving. And the only way you're going to serve your audience is if they know your book is out there. All right, my gift. You can get the audiobook for free. Again, going back to the goals, I would much rather build a long term relationship with you than get a book sale. But you're welcome to buy it too, but you can get the audiobook@self promoteandsucceed.com audio and that will get you my book on how to build your brand and attract your audience and ultimately sell more books. All right, so I see a whole bunch of people here commenting away and I don't have Angela here squeezing my questions out, but I do see some of you were kind enough to go question first. So I'm going to start with those and then we can go back and find other questions. Let's see. And here we go. Let's see. So, S.D. houston. So hard to market myself. It's much easier to market something outside myself. Like the conference. Yeah. And I mean you do such an amazing, such amazing work with the conference and you know, congrats for everything. That you've built with Author Writing Conference as well. But we have to talk about what we're doing. Or nobody knows about our books as well. I'm good at pushing other books like some kind of a drug dealer, but it's hard to push my own books. Well, all right. There's so many places we could take that, but that's a great conversation. Oh, yes. An LLM is a large language model. Sorry about that. I basically was just saying ChatGPT and Claude because most people will know that. Anyways, LLM is kind of the bucket that all of those things fall under. Okay, Bill made it. Yay. Okay, let's see. Goodreads conversation. Dale's next about Amazon advertising secrets. That's coming up in 11 minutes. And I know I saw questions in here. You guys have been chatty. Thank you for all that. Mel. Mel Melville. I think it's Melville. Or Melville. I'm not sure. But you're an introvert, too, and Prescriptive Living. Also an introvert. Heather's also an introvert and been speaking since 2018. So Heather might be able to reinforce what I said, which is being an introvert on stage is actually a great place to be because, again, we can avoid a lot of those small chat conversations. We don't have to spend all day meeting everybody. We can make an impact with a limited amount of energy exertion. Okay, question. Can we get your slides as a download to keep and put in our writerly binder? No, I don't typically share my slides, mostly because they're just my proprietary content. But if there is something in particular you want, you can come back here and guess what, the whole thing is going to be here for you to rewatch over and over again. And if you're really enthusiastic, you can always do screen screen grabs. I can't stop you from that. All right, let's see if there's another question. I am better cheerleading and boosting others than myself. Hey, listen, all of you cheerleaders and book promoters out there, we're looking for another marketing strategist for our team. So if you're really good at picking up the phone and finding cool opportunities for authors, you could always get a job doing it. Just saying. We're always hiring amazing people, and we're looking for a go getter who will kind of create some cool opportunities for our authors. All right, let's see. Heather says Julie and Book Launchers have a lot of great info and they love to share for nonfiction authors. That's right. Thanks, Kevin. And all that success for Jonathan Stanley and he's humble now as he was before the success. Yes, 100%. He's grateful for every moment. It's harder to get him on the phone because he's a lot busier than he was, but he is still an amazing human being. Question. As an author, do you have an outline for speaking to people? Like, if you're going to go to a library and talk. So I'm thinking you're asking, are you. Because there's two pieces to this, so I'm not sure which piece you're asking about. Carolyn, is it the. Do you have an outline for pitching yourself to the library or do you have an outline for what you'll talk, like, what your actual talk will be? So for the pitch, yes. I mean, what, what I always recommend, especially with libraries in particular, is when you go to them. First of all, go to the library, check it out, see what their events are. Most of the libraries are really good about posting their events on their website. You'll see that they're planning quite a few months in advance. So get a sense of what they're, what kind of content they like, go in and talk to them. Librarians are very friendly, very helpful. Go and find out who is in charge of event production at that library. And. And it's different. The title is different for every library. Not every library, but it varies. Who's the one that's creating content. But know their number one focus is what is going to serve their community. So, you know, understanding that and also understanding that they're. They're going to look for your support in bringing more people into their library so they can serve more of the community. So they'll promote it on their website and probably if they have a newsletter, they'll promote it there. But they're also going to look at you as to what can you do to promote this event and make it a great event. So that's where you come in. In a place of partnership and understanding of what it is. And. And yeah, so I'm answering both pieces, so that's good because I didn't know which piece you wanted to know about. But the other piece of what you talk about, that's. And how you structure it, that's going to be a little different for every author. If you've never given talks before, I would recommend taking a course or going through some sort of speaker training at a minimum is just understanding what a good structure would be. Some people do follow the old presentation tactic of, you know, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them. But to me, there's a whole bunch more nuance and there should be stories and examples. We have, we've actually worked with a couple authors that did some really, really good books on presentations. One of them was, oh, this is where I need, Sarah. Presentations that stick, I think was one of them. So start looking, but look for books on that, on subjects that will help you craft a good talk. There's another one that we're working with a client right now that I think would be awesome, but it's not ready yet. But that will help you, too. Chat GPT can also help you with structuring a great talk for certain audiences, so you can tell it what your audience is and then get an outline and then start building stories and examples around it. I think my time is almost up because I want you guys to have a chance to get a drink and then go watch Dale's session and participate in the rest of the AuthorTube Writing Conference. So a huge thank you to SD Houston for putting this on to all the other speakers at the AuthorTube Writing Conference and of course, the sponsors. There is also a packet that goes along with this. I don't have a link for it right now, but I'm sure SD can tell you where you guys can get the participant packet so that you can enter the prizes. I think there's also prizes for speakers so you can vote for your favorite speakers of the day. So much more. And Scotland Scorpion said, it seems it's not too late for me to promote my book after all. Talk about your book, Mark Leslie Lefebvre, Draft two Digital. He had a great line that he said, your book is new to anyone who hasn't read it yet, so you might be tired of talking about it, tired of saying all the same stories, but there's some that whoever you're talking to probably doesn't know about it and it's new to them. The packet is on the website on the schedule page. So go to the AuthorTube Writing Conference webpage to find out the schedule and to get that audience packet. All right, thank you so much, everybody, and thank you, sd. Take care and enjoy the rest of the conference.